The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (41 page)

No—not
like
it. Rather, I was certain I had seen this very object at some prior time. Yet how could that be? I touched the top of the cabinet, brushing away a patina of dust. Three letters were carved into the top, surrounded by swirling lines and moons and stars.

How long I stood there frozen, I do not know. I stared at the letters until the lines around them seemed to writhe and the moons and stars revolved in orbit. That those three initials should appear here, in the house of one who had been his friend, was beyond what chance would allow.

G.O.L.

Gaustien Orandus Lockwell.

I
had
seen this cabinet before. My memories of that time were dim, like the paintings that hung on the walls of Heathcrest Hall. However, if I thought back, I could picture it in one of the rooms at the top of the stairs, beyond a door carved like the drawers with a single shut eye. It had been at the old house on Durrow Street, and the cabinet was yours, Father.

A memory came to me—an unusually vivid and clear recollection. I saw you, Father, in that upstairs room at Durrow Street. I must have been very small, for you seemed to tower above my vantage point. You stood in front of a cabinet—
this
cabinet—and I do not think you knew I was there, standing just outside the door. I watched as you touched the drawers, pressing the eye on each one—

A distant
boom
jolted me from my recollection. It took me a moment to understand that what I had heard was the sound of the door shutting in the front hall below. I looked out the window, peering between the screen of leaves, and a coldness gripped me. Through the ivy I could just make out Jance in the courtyard, leading a massive chestnut gelding toward the stables.

He had returned! That I must fly was my only thought. Yet even as I turned from the window, I hesitated, looking again at the cabinet. Before I could even think what I was doing, I reached out and pressed the eye carved into one of the drawers.

There was an audible
click
. When I withdrew my hand, the eye was open, staring outward.

Again I looked out the window, but the courtyard was empty. I listened but heard no sounds coming from outside the room. Now holding my breath, I pressed another eye, and another, my hand moving in the same order I had observed your own doing all those years ago.

As I pressed the last eye, there was a louder noise, as of some mechanism within the cabinet turning. I hesitated, then tried the topmost drawer. It slid open.

The drawer was empty. In quick succession I opened the others, only to find they were similarly devoid of contents—all except for the bottommost drawer. In it I discovered a single object: a small box of black wood that fit easily in my palm when I picked it up. Despite its small size, it was heavy. A thin line suggested a lid that could be removed, but there was no sign of a hinge or latch. A silver symbol was inlaid in the surface: an eye inscribed within a triangle.

A noise emanated from below me: a thudding, as of heavy boots. My dread was redoubled. I could not be seen coming from this room! I pushed the drawers of the cabinet shut, and as I did, the eye on each one closed with a
snick.
It was only when all were closed that I realized I still held the small box in my hand.

There was no time to replace it. I tucked the box into the pocket of my dress, then turned to dash across the room. However, in my haste my foot caught the end of the cloth that draped the easel. I stumbled, tugging the cloth, and with a whisper it slipped to the floor.

Dismay filled me. I could not leave it cast down like that; my presence here would be revealed. I turned to take up the cloth and throw it back over the easel.

A forest stood before me.

The painting was so large, I could have walked through it as if it were a door. And it seemed like a kind of door to me. Perhaps it was how vividly the trees had been rendered by the artist’s brush—from the moss on their rough bark to the smallest crooked twig—or perhaps it was how the green light in the room seemed not so much to fall upon the painting as fall
into
it, flickering among the bent trunks and mottled leaves, suffusing the image with a lurid glow that mere paint could never have produced.

The trees seemed to sway back and forth in the painting of the Wyrdwood, but it was only an illusion caused by the wavering light. I took a step closer, and a certainty came over me that the painting depicted not just any stand of the ancient forest but rather the very patch that stood to the east of Heathcrest. The trees looked just the same, as did the mossy stone wall.

It occurred to me that I should go. I wanted to, but I could not turn away from the painting. The air deepened, as if a premature twilight fell, and I let out a gasp. Now that I was closer, there was no mistaking it—the trees
did
sway back and forth in the painting, as if tossed by a wind. It was no illusion, nor was it a hallucination brought on by fever, like that night at Lady Marsdel’s. The shabby leaves trembled; the branches bent and dipped, reaching over the stone wall that bound the trees and held them back.

I heard the footsteps again, just outside the room now. The sound of a deep, muffled voice passed through the door. Still, I could not turn away from the painting. There was something caught among the branches of the trees. It was pale and fluttering, like a piece of gauze that had been carried upward by a wind and had caught in the twisted branches. I leaned closer.

My breathing ceased. A rushing noise filled my head. It was not a piece of cloth in the trees.

She wore a white dress. Dark branches wove a cocoon around the woman, cradling her high above the ground, coiling around her arms and legs, caressing her white skin. Leaves tangled in her fair hair. I bent so close that my face nearly touched the painting. But would it indeed encounter canvas if I moved forward another inch? Or would I find myself in the wood, like her, caught among the branches of the trees?

In the painting, the woman turned her head toward me. I caught the edge of a black smile and the glint of green eyes.

Pain stabbed at my head. The rushing noise was my own blood surging violently through my brain. The emerald light pressed in all around, filling my eyes, my nose, my mouth, suffocating me. Through the roaring I heard the sound of a door being thrown open and a stern voice calling out.

There was a distant noise, and I knew it was the sound of my own body striking the floor. For a moment all was a haze of green light.

Then, darkness.

W
HEN I OPENED my eyes again, the green light was gone. The only illumination came from a single candle. I sat up and found myself on a sofa in the front hall. A dark shape hulked nearby: one of the hunting trophies, I supposed—a shaggy brown bear.

The shape moved toward me.

I had little time to feel fear, for as the figure stepped into the circle of light I saw that it was not a bear. Still, the comparison was not unfitting, for there was an ursine quality to his curling brown mane and to his heavy, rounded shoulders and the weight of his step.

“Mr. Quent,” I said. My voice was faint.

“Miss Lockwell,” came his rumbling reply.

Now fear did come over me, nor was it a fanciful dread of shadows. I remembered the secret room, and the painting, and the suffocating green light. I remembered falling and then, just as the darkness came, a pair of strong arms bearing me up off the floor.

“Mr. Quent,” I said again.
It was wrong of me to go into the room. I do not know what possessed me. I can offer no defense. I can say only that I promise to never return there.

But I could not draw in the breath these words required. My heart fluttered in my chest like a bird in a cage.

“Perhaps you should lie back down, Miss Lockwell. I do not believe you are fit to rise yet.”

His voice was low and measured, and I wondered at it. Why did he not berate me for my transgression? I knew him to be capable of the harshest words of reproof. Why did he not use them upon me now? Certainly this time I deserved them!

Astonished, I could only do as he suggested and lie back down on the sofa. The light of the candle grew and shrank by turns.

For several minutes I lay there, motionless. Stunned, really. All the while he stood just on the edge of the light. He might have made for a foreboding figure, only somehow he wasn’t. It was as if his form was a solid column, a buttress that held the darkness back. At last the throbbing in my head receded and the candle’s flame burned more steadily.

Alarm cut through the dullness in my brain, and I sat back up. “The children! I left them alone. I must see to them at once.”

“There is no need for that,” he said. “Mrs. Darendal gave them their supper, and I have put them in their beds.”

“You!” I gasped.

“You seem very surprised. I do not know why. They are quite easy to carry. Easier than yourself, Miss Lockwell. You seem small enough, yet you are something of a burden to bear.”

I shrank back against the sofa, mortified. Of course he had carried me. How else could I have gotten down here?

“How poorly you must regard me,” I said at last. I looked down at my hands in my lap. “But know it is no more poorly than I regard myself. I cannot explain. I don’t know what I was thinking. But I
wasn’t
thinking. I had been exploring the house, as I sometimes do.” I realized belatedly that admitting to snooping was not likely to help my cause. “It’s what I do for exercise, you see, when I cannot take the children outside. Perhaps the long confinement indoors has had an effect upon my nerves. It
must
have been so. And the light in the room was so strange! It was all green, coming through the leaves. When I saw the painting of the wood, it seemed to—”

I halted. There was no need for him to think me weak of mind as well as weak of character.

I sat that way for a minute or more, and he said nothing. At last I forced myself to look up at him. I knew my cause was lost—that when it was day again I must take my bags and leave. So what more harm could it cause to ask the one question on my mind?

“The woman in the painting,” I said to him. “The portrait that hung next to yours. Who is she?”

I saw his left hand stir in his coat pocket. “It is Mrs. Quent in that picture. My wife, that is.”

I should have felt fear at my imminent dismissal. Instead, I felt sorrow. I would go, but he would still be here, alone in this echoing house. Nor could there be any hope
she
would join him; now that I knew she had existed, the evidence of her absence was everywhere around us, in all the shadows, in all the empty silences.

I made myself look at his face. “When did she pass?”

“Years ago,” he said, and that was all.

For a time we were silent. At last, feeling stronger, I pushed myself up from the sofa and found I could stand, if just.

“Miss Lockwell,” he addressed me in a somber tone. “I think—”

There was no need for him to speak the words. “I understand perfectly, Mr. Quent. You will not get any argument from me.” I gave a rueful smile. “Nor from Mrs. Darendal, I would think. And though you owe me nothing, all the same I will ask you for something—that you allow me to be the one to tell the children.”

The lines in his brow deepened. “To tell them what?”

My mind was indeed dull! Had I muttered the words instead of spoken clearly? “To tell them that I have been dismissed from your service. Is that not what you intend?”

“What I intend, Miss Lockwell,” he said with a serious look, “is to find you a better source of exercise.”

And I sat back down on the sofa.

T
HREE DAYS LATER, when I was recovered from the incident in the upstairs room, Mr. Quent went to the village with Jance. When they returned two hours later, Jance was leading a gray mare.

Mr. Quent called me outside; I went eagerly, leaving the children with instructions to continue their reading. The mare was a pretty little thing, with a muzzle like twilight velvet.

“Mr. Quent,” I said at last, trying to contain my delight. “This is too much.”